Monday, July 27, 2009

Have Fun Cleaning Gutters?

Have you cleaned your gutters of spring time debris? If not, it's time to do so--especially in the northeast where we've been having lots of rain. In fact next week, we're due to have thunderstorms every day.

I know you hate this reminder. Cleaning gutters is a repetitious waste of time. No one appreciates you for doing it--its simply expected of you. Ladder out and up you go. If you can just drop the stuff on the ground that's great, but sometimes you can't and you have to use a bucket to collect the leaves and debris--and its relentless--the debris never stops coming down.

But there is hope. You can get rid of the repetitious and often dangerous job of cleaning gutters for ever. Wouldn't that be great? But you're probably wondering what product will actually do the job for they all guarantee to give you peace of mind. I know, I constantly see their ads and read their promises.

Twenty years ago I thought that screens made sense. I took two weeks to install the screens on my home and after I was done, felt like a free man--no more cleaning gutters in the middle of a thunderstorm--stupid thing to do--but I did it many times and with an aluminum ladder.

The first year passed without incident and I was glad to leave the ladder retired. However by the following spring I noticed corn and weeds growing from my gutters. Now I was one unhappy puppy. It took me a week to remove the screens and clean two inches of mulch from the bottom of my gutters. I was depressed thinking I'd be a slave to gutter cleaning forever.

Then there was an idea. A cover to cover the gutters completely with openings in the front vertical surface. First we experimented with one long opening and found that enough debris got through the gutter to clog it. We began cutting fingers into the one long louver and found that it screened out the large debris but the water from the fingers made a mess on the ground. Then we added a second row collectors with fingers and ultimately ended up with two rows of louvers to collect the water and reject the debris.

The question was how long to make the louvers. After much experimentation we settled on 3/4" and made our first tooling--that was twenty years ago.

Today we have all of those homes still with this amazing gutter cover that we named Waterloov--how we named it will be the subject of another post.

Since that time--especially in the first ten years I was fearful that someone would invent something that worked just as well as Waterloov. However, after twenty years I can only laugh at the silliness of the other systems. I often wonder why they don't get totally disgusted with their inadequate systems that I've seen gutters covered by them clog time and time again or that the gutters covers themselves clog requiring service from a ladder--going up ladders defeats the purpose of gutter cover

Ultimately we see time and time again that our competition is our best advertisement. If you want a product that has a twenty year impeccable track record, Want the best gutter covers ever try Waterloov. No gutter ever clogs with Waterloov and no other product is as easy to maintain as Waterloov

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